"How do you know it?"
"_I_ don't know it. I am told."
"Who tells you?"
"Jerusha Babcock and George Washington."
Jerusha Babcock was the name of my maternal grandmother. What could the
woman know of my maternal grandmother? It did not occur to me, I
believe, to wonder what occasion George Washington could find to concern
himself about my dying or my living. There stood the uncanny Jerusha as
pledge that my informant knew what she was talking about. I left the
office with an uneasy sinking at the heart. There was a coffin-store
near by, and I remember the peculiar interest with which I studied the
quilting of the satin lining, and the peculiar crawling sensation which
crept to my fingers' ends.
Determined not to be unnecessarily alarmed, I spent the next three weeks
in testing the communication. I visited one more medium in Boston, two
in New York, one in New Haven, one in Philadelphia, and one in a little
out-of-the-way Connecticut village, where I spent a night, and did not
know a soul. None of these people, I am confident, had ever seen my face
or heard, my name before.
It was a circumstance calculated at least to arrest attention, that
these seven people, each unknown to the others, and without concert with
the others, repeated the ugly message which had sought me out through
the happy summer morning in Washington Street. There was no hesitation,
no doubt, no contradiction. I could not trip them or cross-question them
out of it. Unerring, assured, and consistent, the fiat went forth:--
"On the second of May, at one o'clock in the afternoon, you will pass
out of the body."
I would not have believed them if I could have helped myself, I sighed
for the calm days when I had laughed at medium and prophet, and sneered
at ghost and rapping. I took lodgings in Philadelphia, locked my doors,
and paced my rooms all day and half the night, tortured by my thoughts,
and consulting books of medicine to discover what evidence I could by
any possibility give of unsuspected disease. I was at that time
absolutely well and strong; absolutely well and strong I was forced to
confess myself, after having waded through Latin adjectives and
anatomical illustrations enough to make a ghost of Hercules. I devoted
two days to researches in genealogical pathology, and was rewarded for
my pains by discovering myself to be the possessor of one great-aunt who
had died of heart disease at the advanced age of two months.
Heart disease, then, I settled upon. The alternative was accident.
"Which will it be?" I asked in vain. Upon this point my friends the
mediums held a delicate reserve. "The Influences were confusing, and
they were not prepared to state with exactness."
"Why _don't_ you come home?" my wife wrote in distress and perplexity.
"You promised to come ten days ago, and they need you at the office, and
I need you more than anybody."
"I need you more than anybody!" When the little clinging needs of three
weeks grew into the great want of a lifetime,--O, how could I tell _her_
what was coming?
I did not tell her. When I had hurried home, when she came bounding
through the hall to meet me, when she held up her face, half laughing,
half crying, and flushing and paling, to mine,--the poor little face
that by and by would never watch and glow at my coming,--I could not
tell her.
When the children were in bed and we were alone after tea, she climbed
gravely up into my lap from the little cricket on which she had been
sitting, and put her hands upon my shoulders.
"You're sober, Fred, and pale. Something ails you, you know, and you are
going to tell me all about it."
Her pretty, mischievous face swam suddenly before my eyes. I kissed it,
put her gently down as I would a child, and went away alone till I felt
more like myself.
The winter set in gloomily enough. It may have been the snow-storms, of
which we had an average of one every other day, or it may have been the
storm in my own heart which I was weathering alone.
Whether to believe those people, or whether to laugh at their
predictions; whether to tell my wife, or whether to continue
silent,--these questions tormented me through many wakeful nights and
dreary days. My fears were in nowise allayed by a letter which' I
received one day in January from Gertrude Fellows.
"Why don't you read it aloud? What's the news?" asked Alison. But at one
glance over the opening page I folded the sheet, and did not read it
till I could lock myself into the library alone. The letter ran:--
"I have been much disturbed lately on your behalf. My mother and your
brother Joseph appear to me nearly every day, and charge me with some
message to you which I cannot distinctly grasp. It seems to be clear,
however, as far as this: that some calamity is to befall you in the
spring,--in May, I should say. It seems to me to be of the nature of
death. I do not learn that you can avoid it, but that they desire you to
be prepared for it."
After receiving this last warning, certain uncomfortable words filed
through my brain for days together:--
"Set thine house in order, for thou shalt surely die."
"Never knew you read your Bible so much in all your life," said Alison,
with a pretty pout. "You'll grow so good that I can't begin to keep up
with you. When I try to read my polyglot, the baby comes and bites the
corners, and squeals till I put it away and take him up."
As the winter wore away I arrived at this conclusion: If I were in fact
destined to death in the spring, my wife could not help herself or me by
the knowledge of it. If events proved that I was deluded in the dread,
and I had shared it with her, she would have had all her pain and
anxiety to no purpose. In either case I would insure her happiness for
these few months; they might be her last happy months. At any rate
happiness was a good thing, and she could not have too much of it. To
say that I myself felt no uneasiness as to the event would be
affectation. The old sword of Damocles hung over me. The hair might
hold, but it was a hair.
As the winter passed,--it seemed to me as if winter had never passed so
rapidly before,--I found it natural to watch my health with the most
careful scrutiny; to avoid improper food and undue excitement; to
refrain from long and perilous journeys; to consider whether each new
cook who entered the family might have occasion to poison me. It was an
anomaly which I did not observe at the time, that while in my heart of
hearts I expected to breathe my last upon the second of May, I yet
cherished a distinct plan of fighting, cheating, persuading, or
overmatching death.
I closed a large speculation on which I had been inclined, in the
summer, to "fly"; Alison could never manage petroleum ventures. I wound
up my business in a safe and systematic manner. "Hotchkiss must mean to
retire," people said. I revised my will, and held one long and necessary
conversation with my wife about her future, should "anything happen" to
me. She listened and planned without tears or exclamations; but after we
had finished the talk, she crept up to me with a quiet, puzzled sadness
that I could not bear.
"You are growing so blue lately, Fred! Why, what can 'happen' to you? I
don't believe God can mean to leave me here after you are gone; I don't
believe he _can_ mean to!"
All through the sweet spring days we were much together. I went late to
the office. I came home early. I spent the beautiful twilights at home.
I followed her about the house. I made her read to me, sing to me, sit
by me, touch me with her little, soft hand. I watched her face till the
sight choked me. How soon before she would know? How soon?
"I feel as if we'd just been married over again," she said one day,
pinching my cheek with a low laugh. "You are so good! I'd no idea you
cared so much about me. By and by, when you get over this lazy fit and
go about as you used to, I shall feel so deserted,--you've no idea! I
believe I will order a little widow's cap, and put it on, and wear it
about,--now, what do you mean by getting up and stalking off to look out
of the window? Fine prospect you must have, with the curtain down!"
It is, to say the least, an uncomfortable state of affairs when you find
yourself drawing within a fortnight of the day on which seven people
have assured you that, you are going to shuffle off this mortal coil. It
is not agreeable to have no more idea than the dead (probably not as
much) of the manner in which your demise is to be effected. It is not in
all respects a cheerful mode of existence to dress yourself in the
morning with the reflection that you are never to half wear out your
new mottled coat, and that this striped neck-tie will be laid away by
and by in a little box, and cried over by your wife; to hear your
immediate acquaintances all wondering why you _don't_ get yourself some
new boots; to know that your partner has been heard to say that you are
growing dull at trade; to find the children complaining that you have
engaged no rooms yet at the beach; to look into their upturned eyes and
wonder how long it is going to take for them to forget you; to go out
after breakfast and wonder how many more times you will shut that front
door; to come home in the perfumed dusk and see the faces pressed
against the window to watch for you, and feel warm arms about your neck,
and wonder how soon they will shrink from the chill of you; to feel the
glow of the budding world, and think how blossom and fruit will crimson
and drop without you, and wonder how the blossom and fruit of life can
slip from you in the time of violet smells and orioles.
April, spattered with showers and dripped upon a little with ineffectual
suns, slid restlessly away from me, and I locked my office door one
night, reflecting that it was the night of the first of May, and that
to-morrow was the second.
I spent the evening alone with my wife. I have spent more agreeable
evenings. She came and nestled at my feet, and the firelight painted her
cheeks and hair, and her eyes followed me, and her hand was in mine; but
I have spent more agreeable evenings.
The morning of the second broke without a cloud. Blue jays flashed past
my window; a bed of royal pansies opened to the sun, and the smell of
the fresh, moist earth came up where Tip was digging in his little
garden.
"Not feeling exactly like work to-day," as I told my wife, I did not go
to the office. I asked her to come into the library and sit with me. I
remember that she had a pudding to bake, and refused at first; then
yielded, laughing, and said that I must go without my dessert. I thought
it highly probable that I _should_ go without my dessert.
I remember precisely how pretty she was that morning. She wore a bright
dress,--blue, I think,--and a white crocus in her hair; she had a dainty
white apron tied on, "to cook in," she said, and her pink nails were
powdered with flour. Her eyes laughed and twinkled at me. I remember
thinking how young she looked, and how unready for suffering. I remember
that she brought the baby in after a while, and that Tip came all muddy
from the garden, dragging his tiny hoe over the carpet; that the window
was open, and that, while we all sat there together, a little brown bird
brought some twine and built a nest on an apple-bough just in sight.
I find it difficult to explain the anxiety which I felt, as the, morning
wore on, that dinner should be punctually upon the table at half past
twelve. But I now understand perfectly, as I did not once, the old
philosophy: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."
It was ironing-day, and our dinners were apt to be late upon
ironing-days. I concluded that, if the soup were punctual, and not too
hot, I could leave myself ten or perhaps fifteen unoccupied minutes
before one o'clock. It strikes me as curious now, the gravity with which
this thought underran the fever and pain and dread of the morning.
I fell to reading my hymn-book about twelve o'clock, and when Alison
called me to dinner I did not remember to consult my watch.
The soup was good, though hot. A grim Epicurean stolidity crept over me
as I sat down before it. A man had better make the most of his last
chance at mock-turtle. Fifteen minutes were enough to die in.
I am confident that I ate more rapidly than is consistent with
consummate elegance. I remember that Tip imitated me, and that Allis
opened her eyes at me. I recall distinctly the fact that I had passed my
plate a second time.
I had passed my plate a second time, I say, and had just raised the
spoon to my lips, when it fell from my palsied hand; for the little
bronze clock upon the mantel struck one.
I sat with drawn breath and glared at it; at the relentless silver
hands; at the fierce, and, as it seemed to me, _living_ face of the Time
on its top, who stooped and swung his scythe at me.
"I would like a very _big_ white potato," said Tip, breaking the solemn
silence.
You may or may not believe me, but it is a fact that that is all which
happened.
* * * * *